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June 30, 2006

I have been tucking into a book entitled Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

The author Carlota Perez observes that there are 3 key features which interact and influence eachother

1). The fact that technological change occurs by clusters of radical innovations forming successive and distinct revolutions that modernize the whole productive structure.

2). The functional seperations between financial and production capital, each pursuing profits by different means; and

3). The greater inertia and resistence to change of the socio-institutional framework in comparison with the techno-economic sphere, which is spurred by competitive pressures

Interesting. I had a fascinating chat with a colleague yesterday, concerning the marketing communications and media industries. And we both agreed, there is a great deal of inertia and feet dragging as this exisitng business and media ecology struggles to get to grips with the full force of digitilisation.

Too much at stake, too much money to be lost, too much pain in the process of transition, and a floundering around as to exactly what skill sets are required to enable their clients to succeed in this hyper-competitive world.

I have certainly witnessed this trend.

And having been in the US recently, I witnessed, an incredible surge of innovation clustered around community based business models and structures.

So for those that are still in denial - clients will eventually be asking their big agency networks what exactly they are doing to counterbalance this trend.

The question is whether they will have any real answers?

Perez also states

A technological revolution can be defined as a powerful and highly visible cluster of new and dynamic technologies, products and indutries, capable of bringing about an upheaval in the whole fabric of the economy and propelling a longer-term upsurge of development. It is a strongly interrelated constellation of technical innovations, generally including an important all-pervasive low cost input.

Think Skype or google , or OhMyNews or SecondLife or Current TV Then think about the cost of setting up an iPTV channel.

Once upon a time it would cost £5 million to do that, today the cost £150k

That is the scale of the disruption

Yet what warrants the title for the present purposes is that each of those sets of technological breakthroughs spreads far beyond the confines of the industries and sectors where they originally were developed

This is what all these examples do - plus the create a different type of value.

Life simplifying
Life Enabling
Navigational

So if I was a company with a massive adverising budget, I suggest that one needs to think very hard about the principles of modern day marketing, and I would think also very deeply as to whether the challenges to your economic model is not exactly the same as your marcomms companies.

Whose going to blink first?

Clients will drive the change. And remember it was Jim Stengel of P&G that said that TV advertising stopped working circa 1987 - which curiously enough is the time warp that a lot of agencies seem to be stuck in.

Hideki Komiyama the COO of Sony electronics said

five or six years ago home elctronics was a peaceful market. Now people are coming in like hunting tribes

BT is no longer in telecoms, Channel 4 is no longer a broadcaster, HP no longer manufactuers computers, it consults.

So why do the marcomms and media companies belive that its not their turn? Swim for shore or cling onto the wreckage? Its a good question.

June 29, 2006

We educate our children from the waist up, then we focus on their heads, and then we only educate one side of their brain.

The whole purpose of education is to produce university professors. Who live only in their heads. Their bodies are only there to transport their heads to meetings.

says Sir Ken.

This is truly an inspiring talk about the needs of education going forward. Sir Ken Robinson is senior advisor to the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, and an influential advocate for the importance of creativity in education. He makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for overhauling our education system. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

Sir Ken, reminds us that education in its present form is becoming a devalued commodity, and that the current education system educates creativity out of us.

Education was created at a time when the need was to fuel the explosion of industrialisation, Sir Ken argues passionately that we need to educate the whole child holistically. Children he believes have extraordinary capacities for innovation and creativity. Picasso argued that we are all born artists, the struggle is to hang on to that creativity as you grow up.

The whole world is engulfed in a revolution, which requires us to think deeply how we prepare our children for the future.

You have to be prepared to be wrong to create new things, education and companies stigmatise failure, leading to hubris and stagnation.

Every education system around the world has the same hierarchy of education. Is this right? Yet intelligence is diverse and dynamic. Intelligence engages us totally and collectively.

Creativity can be defined as orginal ideas that have value, and it will combinations of interdisciplinary capabilites that allows us to reframe the world in a new way.

Sir Ken argues that today creativity is as important in education as literacy. It will be the leaps of the human imagination that will build tomorrows companies and economies. Our only hope for the future is to redefine human ecology and rethink how we educate our children

Which should be a worry for any British Government, when they are championing the growing indeed pressing, importance of the creative industries to our economy.

Media owners must find ways to attract and retain talent and create stand-alone digital divisions in order to compete in the era of internet blogs, open access and online communities, Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, has warned. The head of the UK advertising group also acknowledged the difficulty of competing against websites that destroyed business models. "How do you deal with socialistic anarchists?”

Writes Emiko Terazono of the FT

"The internet is the most socialistic force you've ever seen," he added, noting that the response from some media groups had been to offer their content for free in traditional and digital form."They have decided - 'if I don't eat my children, somebody else will'," he told executives from UK regional newspapers attending an industry conference, adding that he disapproved of giving away content for free. "You should charge for it if the consumer values the content,"

Hmmm – Yes perhaps it’s a bummer that business models have been twisted out of shape, and Sir Martin does have an important to point to make. But lets think a bit about this…

Steve Jobs said, I would rather be a pirate than be in the navy, metaphorically these socialistic anarchists as Sorrell calls them are the pirates of the 21st Century. But that does not mean that they live without any rules or boundaries, its just that are different. They are not top down, and they are not about command and control. Have a read of Adam Morgan’s book The Pirate Inside to better understand the point.

Today we live in a world of information empowerment. I would think that businesses have to start by rethinking how they create value, who creates it and how that value is delivered. It is not a straightforward transaction anymore. Business models need to be readdressed. I think advertising becomes the content and content becomes the advertising. Traditional notions of what advertising is and what advertising does, again has to be rethought. And it is not more banner ads that is for sure.

Curiously though, I would have though Sir Martin would have been having a word with his own advertising network that struggles to come to terms with this new super-distributed socio-economy before giving the poor regional newspapers the benefit of his wisdom. Where existing infrastructures and existing creative departments seem still, myopically concentrated on the 60-second spot. And where in the UK at least, creative departments seem only interested in doing ads that their mates are going to applaud down the Dog and Duck.

Today advertising in the UK seems stuck somewhere circa 1986. And that is not me being polemic. That view comes from inside the industry itself.

Question: Are these organisations then any better equipped than the poor old regional newspapers to solve the business and marketing challenges of today?

As a consequence we have to ask, how do organisations structure themselves today and, in the future? And, what talent is required in those organisations?

I would suggest it’s not more of the same. Today, as CEO of SMLXL I find myself for example working with mobile specialists, programmers, 3–Dimensional designers, psychologists, digital specialists, writers, moving image designers, economic modellers, sociologists, film makers. ALL collectively working towards a specific goal. What unites us?
1). No ego
2). A shared belief that nobody is as clever as everybody
3). All our energies, and intellects concentrated on achieving the specific task
4). An interest in solving the business problem not feeding our format machines

SMLXL believes that what client’s need in the first place is good advice not set piece format solutions, being shoe-horned into an asymmetric world.

Therefore, marketing needs to start by thinking – what is the best user experience? And then work back from there. New customer propositions and versatile teams built to solve those problems is the order of the day.

Therefore
Advertising becomes the content, content becomes the advertising.
Advertising becomes the conversation, and the conversation becomes the advertising.

As Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine wrote, “conversation is the kingdom”, and, companies will have better control if they improve the dialogue.

This is what I would describe as the difference between interruptive marketing communications and engagement marketing communications.

For example news is the start of the discussion not the end.

But lets get back to the newspapers. Life can be local - but that is why local newspapers need to think about their role in local communities and then implement completely new and innovative ways to attract readers and advertisers.

Digital strategies have got to be at the very heart of a newspapers business, not an appendage. Those strategies have got to be cross-platform and they have to deliver both added-value for the reader and for the advertiser.

There is an opportunity here to really add value, not dilute it. And the danger is very real.

The Guardian article says

here is a savagery and uniformity about the recent slide which, combined with the perceived threat of the internet, is ringing alarm bells. This time, weekly titles, which have seen sales increase for a number of years, also recorded a fall of about 4.5% across the board - a development that is both troubling and perplexing executives.

The City, which is still trying to work out what the aborted auction of Northcliffe Newspapers means for the future of the regional business, is jittery about the downward trend. "Two or three years ago, you would say it was just about long-term decline because of demographic changes," says Richard Hitchcock, a media analyst at Numis Securities. "But now people are paying closer attention to it because of the internet.

As Peter Williams Finance Director for the Daily Mail and General Trust says...

It's very, very clear what we run are not local newspapers but local media businesses. Our business is to generate vehicles for readers to get information and advertisers to get their message across.

Lets return to Peter Williams’ reference to the internet. The internet is not a channel, it is in fact a whole new ecology. Lets take iPTV for example, which will start to attract communities of interest, and those communities of interest will form new socio-economic models. Value is created in new ways, it will be co-created around conversations and content. It will become a marketplace for trade and community as our once thriving market towns were.

June 28, 2006

For America, the last decade of the twentieth century not only saw a proliferation of the use of new communication technologies but also witnessed the rise of multiculturalism as ethnic communities and new immigrants resisted the earlier normative goal of assimilation into mainstream American society and attempted to retain disparate cultural identities.

Dr Vibert Cambridge's book, Immigration, Diver-sity and Broadcasting in the United States, 1990-2001 , examines how the American broadcasting industry has responded to this increasingly diverse society

The period from 1820 to 1997 saw the settlement of almost 64 million immigrants to the US through processes which he describes as "colonisation, coercion and immigration." This number excludes those who were termed "illegal immigrants" after the imposition of laws intended originally to exclude certain ethnic groups and eventually serving to limit all immigration.

Immigration to the US occurred in four waves, with the last wave representing the period 1965 to the present. While the nation itself was founded by immigrants, the fourth wave had perhaps the most visible impact upon the diversity of the nation since it included large numbers of immigrants from southern regions who contributed to the "browning of America." This wave also encompassed "trans-national immigrants" who relocated to the US for employment purposes but retained cultural and identifying links to their home territories.

Mass communication theory in the United States has evolved through various eras in which the societal impact of the mass media has been differently interpreted depending upon the research methodology employed, but the power of the mass media to define reality was recognised as early as the 1920s when the political commentator Walter Lippmann used the phrase "pictures in our heads" to describe the process.

This defining role was again highlighted by studies over 1929-1933 which found that film causes major changes in behaviour, beliefs and ethnic relations. Viewers who were shown films in which particular ethnic groups were portrayed in a positive manner retained positive feelings towards the group, for instance.

Main-stream mass media, particularly radio and television, traditionally portrayed minorities and immigrants in negative stereotypical roles and the author chronicles the historical attempts by these communities to counter this by producing their own media content.

It was not until the 1960s, however, that concerted societal attempts were made to challenge the dominant ideology of the mass media. Changes in immigration laws in the 1960s which removed discriminatory restrictions coincided with the acceleration of the civil rights movement, and calls were made for more inclusion and particularly for fairer representation of blacks and other minorities by the broadcasting industry. These demands led to a more normative view of the industry's role and spawned both legislation and initiatives by public interest groups.

One significant piece of legislation that emerged was the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 which established statutory public broadcasting entities and legally constrained them to provide programming for America's diversity.

During this period also, the societal impact of the industry was investigated by the President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, the Kerner Commission, whose 1968 report found that the media's distorted portrayal of minorities had fostered and supported discrimination and marginalization.

The consequent evolution of the complex system of the broadcasting industry towards diversity goals is charted by the author and consists of an inter-related mix of legislation, technological advancements and community initiatives.

By the last decade of the century the picture of American society portrayed by the industry is a composite one that is altered by the industry sector through which it is viewed, but is one in which the society's diverse elements are no longer completely obscured by the ethnocentrism of dominant societal elements.

The libertarian founding principle of the industry continued to contradictorily foster concentration of ownership which places command of nodal points of the system into the hands of a dwindling number of behemoth corporations which exert tremendous influence at both the national and global levels and which, through increasing vertical integration, control both the infrastructure and products of the industry.

These companies are inclined by their profit motive towards homogeneity of media content, but minority communities are increasingly being targeted as markets, especially by cable companies, and are therefore becoming more visible though this representation is often subject to an emulsifying process whereby smaller numbers of some nationalities become subsumed into larger groupings.

Societal and legislative pressures have also resulted in efforts to represent diversity in hiring practices. In this latter arena success has thus far been limited with minorities either confronting only partially permeable glass ceilings or being employed primarily on the periphery of the industry with few penetrating the nave.

As Dr Cambridge illustrates, America's diversity is best represented in the arena of public broadcasting and especially in the community broadcasting sector. Non-commercial public television is still constrained by several factors including the need to access funding, but the sector's programming has made great strides towards its legally mandated goal of filling the needs of a diverse society and there is increasing evidence of the representation of minorities in the hiring of key professionals.

In the community, or public access, sector minorities are making increasing use of public access television channels, radio and the internet and the latter has made possible linkages between even the most marginalized communities.

In diversity programming this sector remains the most dynamic since it allows minorities to effectively make their own content.

Dr Cambridge contends that American broadcasting is responding to the needs of the new multicultural "universal nation" but that there continues to be overall disparity of access and this detracts from the "effectiveness of the American public sphere."

He has also shown, however, that the nexus of the tri-partite relationship has spawned the beginning of a "global public sphere" as immigrants to the United States increasingly engage in a plurality of existence and commitment as they function not only within the American environment but also as actively participating citizens of their sending countries and of the geographically disparate regional diasporas to which they become allied.

The Nation has a post focussing on Local and community Media being over-run by media consolidation chasing ad dollars and the middle class

Etan Michaeli believes

Media consolidation has exacerbated the information gap across race and class lines. For some, it has produced an immense bounty. Those who can afford it can purchase access to a wide range of news sources tailored to their political tastes, from cable television networks to Internet sites to periodicals. Independent media sources that appeal to left-leaning, middle-class consumers have been carried along by their readers' swelling bank accounts. Likewise for the corporate-owned news sources like The New Yorker that target "independent" market niches.

But media consolidation has doomed the community news sources most consumed by low-income audiences. Local newspapers, radio and TV are left behind as middle-class readers choose other media and advertisers follow.

In a way, this point of view prompts me to think of the post about young people disengaging from politics I made yesterday

and Michaeli is referring to what is described as the digital divide. The "digital haves" and the "digital have nots"

This is of critical importance for all communities. To have access to information and also to have a voice. Strong communities exist through powerful flows of information and dialogue. Giving people their voice means they have significance, and personal value within the community, this brings I would suggest greater social accountability and responsibility.

The local community needs to be engaged.

I am sure there are a great many more positives than just these.

But through the tools that we have today surely there is no need to have a digital divide?

Today's media universe allows those who can't afford access to slip into a separate and unequal world of second-class information. The poor are watching their media options shrink – both in terms of the number of local sources available to them and in the narrowing content of those national sources that still try to reach them. Calls for media democracy should demand socioeconomic diversity in staff, content and audience among the major sources, as well as a diverse array of news sources at the local level. Access must be guaranteed through universal Internet connectivity and taxpayer subsidies for community-based media through grassroots versions of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We must amplify the voices of the voiceless, both as subjects and as authors.

Ethan Michaeli is the founder and publisher of Residents' Journal a national-award-winning magazine written entirely by Chicago public housing tenants and residents of other low-income communities.

June 27, 2006

A study co-produced by the Hansard Society on e-democracy and OfCom investigates why young people are not engaging with the political process

However it is important to be realistic about the obstacles facing young people in their search for knowledge about how society works; who governs them; what their rights are; and how
they can make changes. Society entreats young people to ‘be good citizens’, but does not provide them with the tools to become so. At the very least, good citizens need to be informed and to communicate about matters of concern to them. In theory the web, with its encyclopedic store of information and opportunities for interactive chat and discourse, is a perfect space for the cultivation of civic knowledge and participation. It has the potential to nurture a more active form of citizenship where the new media become a locus for participation and a facilitator of a national conversation in which the represented learn to present themselves to one anotherand to their elected representatives.

The context for this research is a conspicuous disengagement from politics by young people. 61% of 18-24 year-olds chose not to cast a vote in the 2001 general election, almost double the number for the electorate as a whole. 46% of 18-24 year-olds were of the view that voting in the 2001 election would not make much of a difference, compared with 34% of the electorate as a whole.

33% of 18-24 year-olds reported having no interest at all in media coverage of the election.

There is a strong correlation between young people’s lack of knowledge about politics and their disengagement from the democratic process. In a May 2001 poll for the Electoral Commission, MORI found that 70% of 18-24 year-olds considered that they knew little or hardly anything about how the Westminster Parliament works, compared with 56% of the electorate as a whole. The majority (59%) of those claiming little or no knowledge of how Parliament works did not vote; the vast majority (89%) of those who claimed to know a fair amount or a great deal about Parliament did cast their votes.

Not surprisingly, those who are most confused by civic and political issues are least likely to engage in civic or political life. They are not disengaged because of antipathy to the political system; nor should they be simplistically blamed as apathetic or indolent.

The report then investigates why this is so, perhaps it can be summed up in one word and that is context.

Politics needs context for young people and needs to explain itself better. Take this stat for example 46% of 18-24 year-olds were of the view that voting in the 2001 election would not make much of a difference. If you believe your vote will not make a difference, you won't vote.

Politics should be about improving the dialogue, the better the dialogue, the more engaged people become.

June 26, 2006

WangYou Media a leading user generated content, cross-media, web 2.0 technology enabled entertainment company in China, is incorporating new offline distribution channels for its offerings of entertainment-oriented user generated content (UGC). Most recently, the company has kick started a program to access several million university students across the country with a music radio show produced purely based on content generated by users of its entertainment portal (wangyou.com) that boasts a burgeoning user base of over 4 million 13-26 year olds and more than 10 million daily page views. The show will be customized to air via the schools' own broadcasting stations several times a week.

Covering up to 150 leading universities in 7 provinces, the campus program is designed to help the company further expand and upscale its customer base by penetrating the most promising young and educated demographic that will soon make up the country's mainstay of consumers.

Buddy Ye, CEO of WangYou Media, said,

We believe this program will give us a solid foothold to spread the WangYou name among the well educated youth in China aside from presenting students of our partnered schools with an exciting entertainment program to enrich their campus life. It will also help increase the visibility of our users among their peers.

Since its launch in March 2005, WangYou has been striving to establish itself as an opt-in cross-media entertainment platform targeting and enabling the country's new generation of creative users seeking greater freedom of self-expression. Mr. Ye added, ''The diversification and interactivity of online, mobile and traditional media platforms has remained a differentiator of WangYou's model from other websites in China targeting a similar audience. The campus program is just another step we have made to integrate online and offline resources in order to provide our users with an enhanced experience.''
Along with launching the broadcasting show, the company is also planning to roll out a number of related events to encourage participation on the students' part, including road shows, essay competition, song contest, podcast and other contests. It will also draw on feedbacks from the students to improve its services along the way.
Since November 2005, WangYou has been producing a weekly radio program that airs via over 70 radio stations in 17 provinces, reaching hundreds of millions audience all over the country.

This is an interesting devlopment, as what we describe in our book and on this blog is a global phenomonen, not just a western one.

June 23, 2006

Andy Duncan CEO of Channel 4 has given a lecture sponsored by the new stateman entitled Maximising public value in the "now" media world.

Its quite lengthy, but worthy of 15 minutes of your time. I have picked out a few of the key highlights as they struck me.

I think it is a powerful, and well consructed presentation, however, I do disagree that mass media TV still occupys the centre ground as it once did. Viewing figures of the Christmas Special for British comedy duo Morcambe and Wise in the 70's was some 26 million people. Now only blockbuster events for example, if England make it to the World Cup semi's may even get close. That is the significance of the change.

Duncan also recognises that C4 is no longer a broadcster in the traditional sense, with the creation of multiple-platforms including radio.

He argues the revolution has had a slow fuse, I would agree or as Ed Richards of OfCom described our recent past as an historic, evolving act of liberation.

Duncan worries that we will edit our lives to suit us, which we will, and in doing so we expose ourselves less and less to outside forces, that might help us redefine or alter our world view, and that there is still a vital role for terrestrial broadcasters like C4 to play in this new world order. again I think he is right.

But this comes down to the quality of the programming and content, which he also refers to.

Today however, as we have suggested the world is no longer a world of mass markets, but a world of niche mass audiences. iPTV is a threat and it will develop rapidly over the next few years. As broadband penetration increases it will be interesting to see how people will use that capability to view content that attracts them.

Duncan also refers to myspace.com with conversations going on between 70 million people, and I would also like to mentioin youtube, which gets 40 million unique visitors a day. There is some discrepancy between those numbers and the mass media blockbuster figures of 8 to 5 million for Big Brother.

Markets are no longer toed to geographic borders, and I wonder if this is a challenge that C4 are addressing as the BBC have so successfully done.

Jamie Oliver is also mentioned, as a project that they enabled, School Dinners was a defining moment in TV and beyond and I suggest there are real lessons to be learn't from this particular initiative where a cold media broadcast migrated to a hot media event, engaging audiences, to interact and to take specific action enbaled by a cross media approach to communications.

Five years further into the digital revolution, I want to put to you a rather different proposition. Far from being on its last legs, public service television is the sturdiest bridge we have from the old analogue world of the mass viewing experience to the rapidly emerging future of consumer-led, made-to-measure media and the opportunities of a digitally-connected society. Public broadcasters will help us get there. By then, though, they'll be in much more than the business of broadcasting.

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The transitional period we're in now, between the comfortable certainties of the analogue era and the apparently limitless possibilities of a digital future, can look chaotic, anarchic, even frightening. However, we're not facing a technological fait accompli over which we have absolutely no control. As broadcasters and policy-makers, we don't surrender our ability or abandon our duty to make choices about the post-digital media environment we want, just because it's now possible to search the internet for clips from four million videos or blog the intimacies of our daily lives to a fascinated world.

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So I'd like to use this lecture to explore the role and potential of a public corporation like Channel 4 in a world where broadcasting is just one means of content distribution among many; where those quaint old things we call "programmes" occupy just one shelf in a massive cash-and-carry content warehouse. How will our traditional brief of serving up education and information alongside entertainment fit into a market where power lies with the consumer and the content creator, not the packager? Can public broadcasters be as influential and productive for wider society after digital switchover as they have been until now?

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Finding truth in a confused and rapidly changing market populated by powerful vested interests is a tricky business. While new phenomena such as the "social networking interface" MySpace have impressive hit rates, it's worth remembering the continuing power of traditional TV to deliver big audiences.

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Eight million people tuned in for the opening night of the latest series of Big Brother and nightly audiences are regularly peaking at over five million.

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So everything is shifting all the time. But the main trends are clear enough. Broadcast television is no longer the funnel through which entertainment and information are channelled to millions of waiting consumers in a one-way flow. The ever-expanding choice of reception platform - TV, mobile, internet, MP3 player - and the potential for everyone to create and distribute their own content, however humble, are ineluctably eating away at the broadcaster's traditional role as overseer in the great treasure house of content.

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Already, users of "now" media have a collective experience of a different kind. Television wraps millions of individuals, thousands of disparate groups, together in a cover-all common experience. Mobile and online technologies connect people within those disparate groups, uniting them by common interest or specific purpose - to buy a handbag on eBay, recruit a flashmob, or pick out their favourite bit from Desperate Housewives. You choose who you connect with, search for exactly what you want, see pretty much what you want to see. You're in control. You don't have to accept an experience someone else has made, when and how they decide to give it to you.

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Where once only the rich and the worthy were granted access to the means of creating and distributing content, now virtually anyone can do it. This opens up not just a thousand potential new business models, but millions of ways for people to communicate and share material with each other, many of them delivering their own small packets of social and public value. Bloggers in Iraq, students in Syracuse, voluntary, political and community groups, and yes, the New Statesman (hello, by the way, to those of you listening to this as a podcast); all these people now have a platform from which they can address a global broadband audience and hear back from them.

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Perhaps the most exciting area, with huge potential for making a difference in the "now" media world, is in the heartland of the old public service brief: education.

This is where the explosion of interactivity, the convergence of platforms, the merging of the internet's resources with television's power, has perhaps the greatest potential of all.

June 22, 2006

Alan and I like to promote the successes of companies as we move into the Connected Age. But in a radical transition as we are now, moving from the Networked Age to the Connected Age, there will be players who make mistakes. Some make fatal mistakes. Now TextAmerica seems to be on a collision course with disaster. The iceberg watchman of the Titanic has an alarming announcement...

TextAmerica, according to one of their press releases from last year, are "the leading provider of mobile blogs worldwide." They are based in San Diego USA and have hundreds of thousands of users and several free sites to store pictures and other content. So far so good. Alan and I would wish them all the best. Except that MobHappy reports that TextAmerica has just sent its users a warning that all of the stored content on the free sites will be deleted this autumn! This is an excerpts from the announcement by TextAmerica, as reported by MobHappy:

Update to the TA Community insiders: Due to the complicated nature of the planned upcoming move to a private paid members only community, changes will not be formally announced until sometime in August. Current ‘free sites’ will be suspended starting July 1 with a planned deletion scheduled for the fall 2006. DO NOT QUESTION me about these changes as NOTHING will be said in advance of the official notices. THANK YOU for your consideration in this regard

This is HORRIBLE. Even in an analogue world this is very bad. First inviting customers to join and deposit their memories onto this service with the promise to become the depository for those digital memories, then to even CONTEMPLATE deleting them. Why could they not archive these for their customers? Storage is not that expensive today?

But in a Connected Age this is very close to playing Russian Roulette. The word will spread all over the web. The customers will be furious. They will revolt. If I was a customer considering one of TextAmerica's new paid services, upon hearing about this lack of respect for the existing community, I would immediately leave. There are plenty of better suppliers out there.

So first, thank you Russell Buckley for catching this story and blogging about it. I urge all who are interested in good practises in social networking to repeat and report this story (and please do link to Russell's story at this link: TextAmerica - Responsible Curators of Digital Memories?

Secondly, SHAME ON YOU TextAmerica !!! How dare you! Learn NOW and fix this problem before you feel the wrath of the blogosphere. Google about Kryptonite. Then consider the viability of your business as a reputable mobile blogging site! You should know better.

Thirdly, I usually don't ask for this from our readers, but I do now. If you are a blogger (or journalist or have a website or participate in a discussion group, etc) - please review the story and consider what is your personal view. If you think what TextAmerica is doing is wrong, then I hope you also see this would damage us all as the reputation of a "major player" being this inconsiderate, cruel even. Some of those people don't have PCs, their ONLY storage of their precious pictures is that free space on TextAmerica. So I urge all of our readers to also report this story, blog about it, write about it, give your comment. Also please go join visit Russell's site and post your comment in support.

We do have power in the blogosphere. I am a professional in the IT/telecoms/media space. I can afford my own storage. But many of those customers of TextAmerica are not that fortunate. Its time for us to go help them. What TextAmerica is now trying to do is wrong.

I consider myself a vidiot. A video idiot. I love my TV. I also have loved music videos very specifically, long before they were called that, and started collecting music videos nearly a decade before MTV was launched. To me the marriage of pop music and TV was always exceptionally powerful video entertainment.

I was born in Finland and in my early teen years Finland's three radio stations broadcast only a couple of hours of pop/rock music per week. And back then when TV was aspiring to deliver high quality and culture, there of course was no pop or rock music on TV, of any kind in Finland.

So on my first visit to England in the summer of 1973 I felt like I had arrived in heaven. A 24 hour radio station playing pop music (BBC). To someone so accustomed to a scarsity of pop music on the airwaves, this alone would have made my England trip one of a lifetime.

Except that there was something even more amazing. Top of the Pops. I spent two weeks in England, and therefore I got to experience Top of the Pops twice. A whole TV show of pop music, the best-selling songs straight from the charts in England - with the actual stars, bands, artists, performing "live" (I was too young to understand what was lip-synching). T.Rex, The Sweet, Suzi Quattro, Slade, David Bowie.. I only knew of these bands from pushing precious coins into juke boxes in Finland and from pictures in the Finnish pop music monthly, Suosikki. Now they were not only playing on the radio every day all day - but I got to see all the biggest stars perform on TV.

For anyone of our readers in their 30s or 20s this may be very difficult to understand. You have grown up with music on radio and TV 24 hours a day anywhere everywhere. And on the net and on Napster and on iPods etc. But remember that the teenager in me had never seen any TV show that featured pop music.

I remember back then deciding that if one day in the future I could have the kind of job that would allow me to work and live in England (in London naturally), that would be heaven. From back then I knew I would seek an internationally appreciated job or career as this would be my best ticket to land a job in London.. Funny how things work out in the long run..

So for me Top of the Pops was the start of a love-affair of seeing my favourite artists perform. Eventually around 1974 in Finland we also got our own monthly pop music TV show (Iltatahti), and I would get to see (and collect onto videotape) those early precursors to what is music video today.

MTV came along in 1982 and I was also quite blessed to be studying in America from 1983, so I got to see the very early stages of MTV. By this time I was one of the very small minority who felt music video was an art form and totally valid entertainment. I often argued with my peers about music - claiming (as I still feel) that I prefer seeing a well made music video to seeing the band butchering the same song performing it live. We've written about MTV in the book and on this blogsite in various contexts, such as this celebration of MTV turning 24 last year. I often also use various innovations from MTV in my workshops and seminars. I love MTV (or to use their old slogan, I want my MTV). I track MTV closely and am happy that MTV now operates over 40 separate networks in several dozen countries/regions.

Incidentially once I moved to England in 2001, I got myself a set top box and accessed several 24 hour music video channels. Because of that, even thought I liked Top of the Pops from my youth, I never really tuned to that show on the BBC. Behaving in this way like those of Generation-C, I plan my usage of media, I don't let the media control me. So I am not a slave to when the BBC decides to broadcast its chart show. Oh, and obviously, Top of the Pops has the artists performing. I actually prefer to see the music video rather than a stage performance with some old-fashioned camera movements and flashing lights and dancers to try to build the emotion to the song.

Over the past five years I must have watched Top of the Pops perhaps a dozen times. But every day at home I have a music video channel as my background music, switching between that and CNN and BBC 24 hour news (I'm also a news junkie. Once a vidiot, always a vidiot)

So clearly I've had a long close relationship with enjoying music on TV. Today's (well, technically yesterday June 21 it was reported in the Financial Times) announcement that the BBC will discontinue running Top of the Pops took me totally by surprise. The BBC has been running this cultural icon and staple of the UK pop music scene continuously for 42 years. It is the longest running regularly scheduled music program on the planet. At its peak Top of the Pops reached a weekly audience of 19 million (and remember the UK has a population of 60 million). Today the viewership is down to 1 million.

I should have seen this coming. It was only in February of this year that we reported that another long-running youth/pop music icon of the UK scene - the magazine Smash Hits was being terminated.

And we gave the reasons - lack of readership. The target readers were now online and dividing their attention into anything from videogames to mobile phones. I should have seen this coming for TOTP.

On the one hand I've seen the proliferation of 24 hour music channels (MTV and its clones). And on the other hand after starging on the book project with Alan, over the past few years I've reported how all those traditional uni-directional media formats are suffering and now dying.

I should have seen this coming. Still I didn't. And it does make me sad in a small way. Top of the Pops was something quite spectacular. Many UK based artists who really made it huge worldwide, had their career take off through their first appearances on TOTP, from David Bowie and T.Rex to Queen to Duran Duran etc. I believe the Beatles took off just prior to the launch of Top of the Pops, but I've heard the Rolling Stones attribute their initial success much to their "bad boy" image of their appearances on Top of the Pops. That show made stars. And appearing on that show was a validation for any British band that they had finally made it.

Now that show will be cancelled. What does most sadden me about this, is that the BBC clearly is very close to popular culture. The BBC is also very active in the digital space, building communities, engaging with their viewers (and listeners and web surfers). This is a British cultural icon. Could the BBC not revive it and reformat the show to fit Generation-C. Its not that the BBC is ignorant of the megatrends that Alan and I discuss here daily. We've both met with many BBC executives in various occasions, and definitely we feel that the BBC is much more along the way than most broadcasters, in migrating their corporate future into the digital, connected and community age. They are well on the way to learning to engage.

Did Top of the Pops have to die? My heart pleads for it not to be. But also, my brain coldly reminds me that there are many programs I will "Tivo" ie set my PVR to record - and never was that Top of the Pops. If someone so much addicted to pop music on TV like myself is actively ignoring TOTP, then definitely its time had come. There are many websites I visit. I never even bothered to seek the site for TOTP. I watch music videos every day whether here in London or in some hotel in some foreign time zone. But I do not tune into TOTP.

Yes, this was a dinosaur. How many rock stars said to not trust people over the age of 30? Perhaps TOTP should have been kindly killed a decade ago, when it reached its 30s. Yes lets let it go in peace. But for that magical summer in 1973 when I SAW that sexy leather-clad Suzi Quattro belt out 48 Crash on Top of the Pops, I still get shivers in my spine recalling those moments. I did feel that I had been given a preview of heaven back then. Top of the Pops will always retain a top spot in memories of my youth.

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Tomi Ahonen is a bestselling author whose twelve books on mobile have already been referenced in over 100 books by his peers. Rated the most influential expert in mobile by Forbes in December 2011, Tomi speaks regularly at conferences doing about 20 public speakerships annually. With over 250 public speaking engagements, Tomi been seen by a cumulative audience of over 100,000 people on all six inhabited continents. The former Nokia executive has run a consulting practise on digital convergence, interactive media, engagement marketing, high tech and next generation mobile. Tomi is currently based out of Helsinki but supports Fortune 500 sized companies across the globe. His reference client list includes Axiata, Bank of America, BBC, BNP Paribas, China Mobile, Emap, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HSBC, IBM, Intel, LG, MTS, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Ogilvy, Orange, RIM, Sanomamedia, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Three, Tigo, Vodafone, etc. To see his full bio and his books, visit www.tomiahonen.com Tomi Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on next generation mobile and digital convergence. Follow him on Twitter as @tomiahonen. Tomi also has a Facebook and Linked In page under his own name. He is available for consulting, speaking engagements and as expert witness, please write to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com

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